A Charm of Powerful Trouble (10 page)

With the rough drawings spread out beside her on the verandah, Emma tried to make a final picture. Her crayon rasped softy and swiftly across the paper. In the garden a spangled drongo glittered. Em sat back in her chair, a hairbrush in her lap.

‘I see you've found your father's forest,' she said. There was absolutely no weight in her voice at all, no inflexion to help Emma discern her feelings about what she said.

Emma didn't look up; the crayon flashed a confident line down the curve of the
trunk.
‘Tell me about it,' she said. Emma knew then that she was right, that the clump of trees she'd found was a kind of room where she could discover things.

‘It wasn't always a forest. It was just that fig tree at first,' said Aunt Em, her voice airy and detached, as if this was ancient history. ‘The one you're drawing. That was all that was there. It was all that they left when they cleared the land. Sam and I used to walk up there and sit in the shade. But when he was - oh, only about nine or ten - he saw that there were seedlings coming up beneath it.'

Now Aunt Em's face was puckered with the pleasure of remembering, her eyes narrowed. ‘And he said to me, "Auntie, these little plants must be from seeds the birds have dropped after they've eaten fruit from the trees in the hills." And he said we should make a fence round the fig so the cattle couldn't eat the seedlings.

‘So that's what we got his father to do - Sam wanted the fence put some way out from the fig to allow the trees room to spread. He pestered and pestered me to get him books about plants.' Em laughed with pride. ‘He was such a clever boy He learned how to identify them by looking at the leaves and so on. And he went into the hills where the scrub hadn't been cleared and brought back seeds himself, from trees he found there, and he raised them up and planted them along with all the seedlings left by the birds.'

‘And all these years later they're all still here,' said Emma.

‘Yes,' said Em. ‘And he knew they would be. He said to me, "Auntie, when we're all long dead these trees will still be alive. That fig has already lived for a hundred years or more." Oh, he loved trees. And he didn't want to be a lawyer like his father and grandfather. He said he'd die if he sat in an office all day He liked going out to where it was wild. He dreamed of finding a new species, a plant that no one had discovered. He said there were still plants out there that hadn't yet been identified.'

Emma glanced quickly at Em's face and then back down to the drawing of her father's fig. Em didn't look sad; her face was calm, clear, remembering. Her hairbrush was forgotten on her lap, her hair awry and only partially unpinned.

Emma put her sketchpad aside and stood up. With one hand on her great-aunt's shoulder, she leaned forward and took up the hairbrush from her lap. She removed the last few pins from Em's hair and began gently to brush it out. She noticed the pale skin of her scalp, the delicate whorls of her ears, the fine strands of white hair, and she was breathless with awe that you could be this close to someone.

Ever so slightly, Em leaned against Emma's body ‘He was such a funny little boy,' said Em. ‘When I arrived to look after him when his mother died, he said in the kitchen on the first morning, when I was about to cook breakfast, "Don't you use my mother's saucepans!"' She laughed at the memory.

Emma moved in front of Em and knelt down. Aunt Em's skin was so lined and wrinkled that her face seemed decorated with a beautiful deliberate pattern. She put her hand at the side of Em's face, smoothing the hair over her ears, so that all she could see of Em now was her face. Em's eyes looked steadily back at her and Emma held the gaze, wanting to remember, wanting to capture this particular view of Em so that she'd never forget. Then quickly Emma stood up, kissed Em on the forehead, said ‘All done!' and put the hairbrush back into her lap.

Em took up the hairpins and put her hair up again. She needed no mirror; it was something she'd practised for most of her eighty-three years.

When Emma, alone in her room that night, drew a portrait of her great-aunt from memory, the whole page was filled with a face, not the whole face, but the part around the eyes. And her drawing wasn't symmetrical, but slanted and partial, and when she'd finished, it wasn't a picture of an old woman at all but of a child.

At the beginning Emma had counted down the days till she could leave, but now she found she didn't want to go home. She loved it here with Em. And miraculously she became ill, just a day before she was to go. She came down with a fever, felt dizzy, sweated, then felt as cold as ice. Perhaps it was all that wandering around on humid nights, coming in with her hair beaded with raindrops, that did it.

She floated on a wave of illness. Aunt Em called the doctor, who said she should rest, and have plenty of liquids. Flora came, and changed the tangled, damp sheets for cool crisp ones. She changed Emma's nightie for her too, when she was too weak to even lift it over her head. Stella brought grapes, carrylng them into the room reverentially in a cut-glass bowl.

At last, in the middle of one morning, Emma woke from sleep and felt well, and strong. She got out of bed and found that she could walk. But once she was up she found she wasn't strong, she was weak. She went out onto the verandah. Em was in the garden, a pair of clippers in her hand. Emma watched as she drew a red rose towards her and, with her eyes closed, breathed in the scent. Emma saw how surprised and pleased she was at being alive.

Emma got up at dawn the following morning and put on a long red dress.

In a red dress and in her bare feet my mother, aged sixteen, walked across the paddocks till she was within sight of the sea.

The sun was not quite up. The grass was moist, and it wet her feet and the bottom of her dress. She walked, avoiding cowpats, ducking under barbed wire fences, looking at the marvel of dewdrops on spider webs until, breathless, over an hour later, she came upon the argent ribbon of the sea stretched out on the horizon.

Argent
was the word she used to describe it to herself. It was a word with overtones of heraldry and mediaeval heroism, a colour you might find on a shield, or a coat of arms. The sea was a crumpled silver, as if someone had screwed it up and then straightened it out again and laid it in that space where the sea meets the sky. Then, having sighted the sea, she stopped to catch her breath, and turned round and walked back, ‘trailing clouds of glory', she told herself (a line she'd got from a poem). It was an easier walk, being mostly downhill, but this time the sun was hotter and higher. She paused to pick bits of grass to chew on, and flowers she liked the look of - weeds, mostly - so that by the time she reached Em's house she was trailing not only glory but various bits of vegetation as well.

The house was silent. Emma went to the kitchen and put on the electric jug for tea. When it was made (and this was the first time she'd made tea for Em, who usually got up first) she took a cup to Em's room. Em was lying in bed, with her hands folded neatly across the white cotton sheet. It was the way she slept on her afternoon naps: neat, spare, contained within her body as though it were a box. But now there was something different about her. Em was dead.

Emma sat the cup down on the bedside table (it shook, and spilled into the saucer) and touched Em gently on the hand. Em's skin was the texture and colour of a dried leaf that Emma had collected on her walk: papery, mottled, delicately veined. When Emma had held the leaf up to the light, the paler patches proved to have almost worn away; the light showed right through them. Emma lifted Em's hand and laid it gently down again. Then she left the room, not knowing what to do.

She went to the foot of the stairs and paused, her hand on the banister. Then decisively (though she didn't decide; she didn't even think), she went up the stairs two at a time till she reached the top.

There was no locked room. There was no nursery left exactly as it had been when Em's twin sister died over eighty years before. There was, in fact, very little furniture and a lot of dust and dirt. The skeleton of a bird lay in a fireplace, a few tattered black feathers still intact.

Emma pushed up a window. It was stiff and difficult to shift and made a noise she wanted at once to stifle, it was so loud in the stillness of the house. Fresh air flowed in, and she stood with the breeze on her face. From her vantage point she could see right over to Flora's house. She saw Flora and Stella come out of the house together, and the chooks come crowding around them. She thought she could hear their voices. In a little while she would go across the paddock and tell Flora that Aunt Em was dead, but for now she would just stand at the window and look out.

Em is dead and she is a child having her photograph taken with her mother on the verandah. The light falls through a slatted blind onto their faces. She is a young woman about to cook breakfast for her nephew who says, ‘Don't you use my mother's saucepans.' He is a child planting a forest around the central core of a vast, maternal fig. He is lacing his boots and setting out on a plant-hunting expedition and his body will never be found. His widow sits in resignation and knits in front of the television. His daughter stands at the top of his childhood home and thinks how all time is simultaneous; everything is happening at the same time and forever.

‘Whose legs?' demands Stella. ‘And anyway, they aren't
part
of anyone, they're just legs.'

Aunt Em goes inside to make more tea. And Flora seizes Stella by the hand and they waltz along the verandah and inside the house, down the hallway through the shadowy interior to the blinding light at the back door and back again. Emma gets up to watch, seeing the shape their two bodies make togethel; a whirling circle with hands clasped high; they are two indistinct female figures.

Em is arrested in the act of slicing a long brown pear down the middle by Flora, who takes her laughing and protestingfor a slower whirl, leaving the two halves of the pear and half a pawpaw and the steaming teapot on the kitchen table.

A rooster crows from Flora's farmhouse over the way and a black and white dog, a border collie awned by the man who comes to do the garden, runs round and round outside on the grass.